Quotulatiousness

July 5, 2026

Progressives are only against “some people” getting wealthy

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson posted an accurate assessment of how progressives view certain kinds of wealthy people as being undeserving of their fortunes:

Konstantin Kisin explained why this is the case:

This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They’re against certain types of people being crazy rich.

Artists and athletes make sense to them because they’ve played music and sports and because their success can be explained by “luck” and “talent”. Messi’s wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are.

But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They’ve never taken entrepreneurial risk. They’ve never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They’ve never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they’ve picked up a ball or a guitar.

They *literally* don’t understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly.

It’s why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don’t understand why they’re wealthy.

Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, “diverse”, left wing etc. Business leaders are “evil” middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don’t understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it’s just harder to measure.

July 3, 2026

QotD: Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he was inspired in the classroom by Charles Beard, America’s foremost progressive historian — and a man sympathetic to socialism. “Beard was nothing less than a spellbinder”, Josephson recalled, and Beard’s lectures helped guide him on a path to radical politics.

During the 1920s, after graduation, Josephson became a journalist, an expatriate to France, and, after his return, a part of New York’s literary elite. He and Beard reconnected in 1930, and the mentor urged his student to write a book denouncing the men who had launched America’s industrial power. “Oh! those respectable ones”, Beard said of America’s capitalists, “oh! their temples of respectability — how I detest them, how I would love to pull them all down!” Happily for Beard, Josephson was handy to do the job for him. Josephson dedicated The Robber Barons to Beard, the historian most responsible for the book’s contents.

Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism”. He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s …”

Though not a member of the Communist Party, Josephson co-authored an open letter of support for the Communist Party candidates for President of the United States in 1932. “We believe”, the letter said, “that the only effective way to protest against the chaos, the appalling wastefulness, and the indescribable misery inherent in the present economic system is to vote for the Communist candidates”.

Josephson traced the troubled capitalist system of the 1930s back to the entrepreneurs of the late 1800s. Thus, by explaining what he thought was the wasteful, greedy, and corrupt development of steel, oil, and other industries under capitalism, Josephson was explaining to readers why the Great Depression was occurring. “I am not a complete Marxist”, Josephson insisted, “But what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentration, in Vol. 1 of [Marx’s] Capital, which underlay my book”.

Josephson never intended to write an objective view of American economic life in the Gilded Age. He did little research and mainly used secondary sources that supported his Marxist viewpoint. As he had written in the New Republic, “Far from shunning propaganda, we must use it more nobly, more skillfully than our predecessors, and speak through it in the local language and slogans.” Thus he wrote The Robber Barons with dramatic stories, anecdotes, and innuendos that demeaned corporate America and made the case for massive government intervention.

Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.

June 30, 2026

QotD: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were just two of many radical critics of the industrial society. But it was their achievement to devise the first internally consistent blueprint for an alternative social order. A mixture of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, which represented the historical process as dialectical, and the political economy of David Ricardo, which posited diminishing returns for capital and an “iron” law of wages, Marxism took Carlyle’s revulsion against the industrial economy and substituted a utopia for nostalgia.

Marx himself was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was “née Baroness von Westphalen” but was not above siring an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was an evening hobby, along with foxhunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father’s cotton factories in Manchester (the patent product of which was known as Diamond Thread). No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.

The essence of Marxism was the belief that the industrial economy was doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society divided between the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, and a property-less proletariat. Capitalism inexorably demanded the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands and the reduction of everyone else to wage slavery, which meant being paid only “that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer”. In chapter 32 of the first tome of Capital (1867), Marx prophesied the inevitable denouement:

    Along with the constant decrease of the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class …

    The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

It is no coincidence that this passage has a Wagnerian quality, part Götterdämmerung, part Parsifal. But by the time the book was published the great composer had left the spirit of 1848 far behind. Instead it was Eugene Pottier’s song “The Internationale” that became the anthem of Marxism. Set to music by Pierre De Geyter, it urged the “servile masses” to put aside their religious “superstitions” and national allegiances and to make war on the “thieves” and their accomplices, the tyrants, the generals, princes and peers.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

June 28, 2026

QotD: Getting cloth to market in the ancient and medieval world

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Transport costs remain a significant factor in the organization of textile trade. Prior to the invention of the steam engine and thus the train, moving lower value goods in any kind of bulk overland any significant distance was prohibitively expensive. In contrast, seas and rivers represented blue roads and highways, allowing for far cheaper and faster transport of bulk goods. The typical estimate, derived from the Diocletian’s Price Edict (and thus dating to the Late [Western] Roman Empire, so this is with the system of Roman roads; take those away and things get even worse for land transport) is that the ratio of the cost of land, river and sea transport was roughly 20:4:1, with sea transport thus being four times cheaper than river transport and twenty times cheaper than road transport for bulk goods (like fabric).

It should thus be of little surprise that regions involved in major textile production for export were often concentrated either on coasts or on rivers that were navigable to the sea (one may map the regions Pliny lists as major wool and linen exporters to find that they are all accessible by sea). While the sheep themselves may be grazed part of the year up in the uplands far from the coast, one of the great advantages of transhumance is that the sheep may transport themselves under the care of their shepherds to villages and lower pastures not too far from coastal towns which may serve as centers of textile production and major points of sale.

Now those transport costs become less and less significant the more valuable the goods being transported are. For a bulk good like grain (or common wool), transport may represent a majority of the costs. But if one is shipping something extremely valuable (particularly valuable per unit weight), the cost of acquisition at the source (and the profits of final sale) are much larger relative to the transport costs and less efficient methods of transportation become useful, thus the viability of silk and other expensive luxury goods being transported overland across Eurasia on the famous Silk Road.

Very high value fabrics didn’t need to come from so far afield though. In the Roman world, the province of Asia (corresponding roughly to western Turkey today) had several notable centers of production for particularly high valued textiles (on this, see I. Benda-Weber, “Textile Production Centers, Products and Merchants in the Roman Province of Asia” in Gleba and Pásztókai-Szeöke, op. cit.). Thyateira’s guild of purple-dyers (the πορφυροβάφοι) seem to have had trade contacts for their wares – wool dyed Tyrian purple via the murex snail – all over the province as well as in Macedonia and Italy. Weavers in the region were also known for producing fabrics with complex woven patterns and Miletus, one of the major ports in the region, had as noted the reputation for producing the best dyed wool in the Mediterranean. Such fabrics were highly valued and we find evidence that such fabrics were bought not merely by the Roman elite, but also made overland as far as Persia where such wares were valued at the Achaemenid (550-330 BC) court.

Neverthless, not all fabrics moving through trade in antiquity or the middle ages were rare or high value fabrics. As Jinyu Liu notes in a study of inscriptions relating to the textile trade, “coarse wool and wool of medium quality, and products made of these non-luxury wools dominated the market” in the Roman Empire, often being “pulled” through trade towards both large population centers in the interior of the empire and towards the Roman armies in the frontier provinces, both of which must have outstripped local production in their demand for textiles (Liu, “Trade, Traders and Guilds (?) in Textiles” in Gleba and Pásztókai-Szeöke, op. cit.). This trade included not just fabrics but also ready-made products like garments or blankets which must have been aimed at fairly modest people, neither the very poor (who couldn’t afford them) nor the wealthy (who wouldn’t have been caught dead in “ready-made” one-size-fits-no-one clothing), but rather the middling urban workers and common soldiers (and perhaps small farmers, though we might assume their households would produce most of their own textiles in the countryside where wool and flax, being agricultural and pastoral products, might be more available).

In Medieval Europe, just as in the ancient world, the centers of textile trading tended to follow the water as it made transport easier. England was a major wool-producing center in the high and later Middle Ages (and into the Early Modern period), with J.S. Lee (op. cit., 9) estimating production per capita exploding from around 1.3 pounds per person in the early 1300s to 7 pounds by the 1550s as the textile production system in England reoriented towards export. Wool products, produced in towns mostly in towns that were nearly coastal or had river-access flowed down by coastal trade and up the Thames to London to either be sold and used there or to be further exported to the dyers and fabric markets of the Low Countries (where fabrics could use the Rhine to travel further into the continent) or to be bought by the merchants of the Hanseatic League and so head into the Baltic.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVb: Cloth Money”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-09.

June 27, 2026

QotD: When Marxism went mainstream in higher education

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges“, describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.

“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders”, wrote Felicity Barringer.

There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.

As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable”, the Times reported.

“There are a lot of people who don’t want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)

Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive. Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.

“Marx has become relativized”, Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.

Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.

“Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are”, Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.

Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application”, but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.

Kristian Niemietz, “The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-09-18.

June 26, 2026

No “capital formation”, please: we’re Canadian

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies one of the biggest reasons the Canadian economy is falling ever further behind other industrialized nations:

AI-generated image from L. Wayne Mathison

Canada does not have a talent shortage.

It has a capital formation shortage.

In Q1 2026, Canada managed one growth-stage VC deal. One. Worth $1M.

That is lemonade-stand money in a global tech race.

The U.S. pulled in $267.2B in VC investment. Capital is not confused. It goes where risk is rewarded, scale is possible, and success is not treated like a moral offence.

Carney and the Liberals keep talking about “building the economy” while presiding over a country where founders raise seed money here, then scale somewhere else.

That is the real brain drain.

Not just doctors. Not just engineers. Builders. Founders. Investors. People who can turn ideas into payrolls.

They look at Canada and see taxes, red tape, weak productivity, political favouritism, and a government more interested in managing decline than getting out of the way.

Carney was sold as the adult in the room. OK. Then explain this: why is Canada producing press releases while the Americans are producing companies?

Because capital can smell fear.

And right now, Canada smells like a country that punishes ambition, subsidizes failure, and calls it fairness.

June 25, 2026

Credit card fee cap: a great idea, with the best of intentions … what possibly could go wrong?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Nobody likes credit card fees — except the banks that issue credit cards — so politicians figure that they can please the voters at no cost and mandate limits to the fees that credit card companies can charge. But who is going to suffer for this “at no cost” bit of rule-making?

“Credit Cards” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Two years ago, Illinois passed crowd-pleasing restrictions on credit card interchange fees, which are better known as “swipe fees”. The ban on charging fees on processing payments for tips and taxes has now been delayed twice by skeptical federal judges and lawmakers worried that they’ve crafted a financial mess. These interventions may be saving the state from itself, as a new report points out that the law threatens to hurt consumers, small retailers, and local financial institutions.

Delayed Ban on Fees for Processing Taxes and Tips

Passed as part of a 2024 revenue bill, the Interchange Fee Prohibition Act (IFPA) defines “interchange fee” as “a fee established, charged, or received by a payment card network for the purpose of compensating the issuer for its involvement in an electronic payment transaction”. It adds: “An issuer, a payment card network, an acquirer bank, or a processor may not receive or charge a merchant any interchange fee on the tax amount or gratuity of an electronic payment transaction if the merchant informs the acquirer bank or its designee of the tax or gratuity amount as part of the authorization or settlement process for the electronic payment transaction”.

“Although merchants have long advocated for this change, banking and payment industry representatives argue that it imposes an undue hardship by forcing them to process certain components of transactions without compensation,” attorneys Thomas V. Panoff and Maxwell Earp-Thomas noted for the National Law Review at the time. They also commented that the law could force Illinois payments to be processed differently than those originating in the rest of the country and the world beyond.

The situation is now being fought in court and in public between advocates who argue the fees are hidden costs and opponents who say they’re an industry-standard means to cover the cost of business.

[…]

Overall, Illinois lawmakers’ attempt to please the crowd by mandating lower costs looks poised to create a mess that could leave the state’s consumers, small banks, and retailers with higher costs and fewer choices if financial institutions leave to avoid headaches.

“To protect the integrity of the checkout experience and avoid driving financial providers from the Illinois market, the IFPA must be either repealed or overturned”, concludes Swedberg.

Credit card fees are undoubtedly burdensome for consumers and retailers. Ultimately the best way to avoid them is the traditional way: Use cash.

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

June 24, 2026

Anarchy and poverty are the “natural state” of man

Filed under: Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen has a bit of fun refuting a silly diatribe about the evils of capitalism:

Of course capitalism isn’t natural, you incomplete set of plastic picnic utensils.

What’s natural is theft, robbery, and murder.

What’s natural is anarchy, chaos, the rape of the weak by the strong, and nature red in tooth and claw.

The free market, which you call “capitalism”, is not called “free” because everyone is free to do whatever they want. Because what a lot of people want to do is steal. You’ll know which ones by the hammer and sickle logo they draw on things.

No, the free market is called free because it is freed from coercion and violence.

And of course it was spread by violence, you factory-defective lawn flamingo. Because it was spread by hanging all the bandits and robbers, and if hangings aren’t violence I don’t know what is.

And of course it’s maintained by coercion, you British pub food connoisseur. If you don’t coerce thieves not to steal, then they will steal everything you build faster than than you can build it.

You have to use violence to stop the violent, and coerce the coercers not to coerce.

And of course it’s maintained by the superficial facade of liberal democracy, you Vogon poetry appreciator. The global average citizen is a mentally retarded third-world savage with less emotional self-control than my cat. If we let them have candidates that truly represented their agenda, then every useful thing humanity has built for the last twelve thousand years would be torn down in a week to buy them more party drugs. Followed by every woman being raped to death, and then uncomprehending starvation as they slowly and painfully learned that grocery stores don’t spontaneously spawn food pickups, like in video games.

Jesus Christ, woman, you’re talking about a species that evolved to live in hominid tribes of 100 apes, and throw rocks at zebras. In modern civilization, the so-called “average” person is so far out of his depth that the fish have lights on their noses.

And the more complex and sophisticated civilization gets, the more investments in the future that we need to protect, so that the retarded monkeys don’t steal them all to buy more vodka and cigarettes.

Yeah, sure, sometimes capitalist systems end up defending property that someone’s great-grandfather stole. But so fucking what? You think communism is gonna fix that? You think communism is gonna bring justice?

Communist nations can’t afford justice. They can’t even manage to feed themselves half the time. Get back to us when you’ve mastered the agricultural revolution, we’ve only been waiting since the beginning of recorded time.

The trick is to put the seeds in the dirt, guys.

June 21, 2026

How To Make War Inevitable – Death of Democracy 20 – Q4 1937

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 20 Jun 2026

By late 1937, Nazi Germany’s rearmament economy had trapped itself. Autarky was failing. Hjalmar Schacht was pushed aside. Göring’s Four-Year Plan dominated economic policy. And at the secret Hossbach meeting of November 5, Hitler turned economic impossibility into an argument for territorial conquest.

This episode covers Q4 1937: the Hossbach Memorandum, Schacht’s resignation, the Anti-Comintern alignment, Lord Halifax’s visit, Himmler’s police-state consolidation, the December “Preventive Crime Fighting” decree, and the antisemitic propaganda exhibition Der Ewige Jude.

The argument is not that war was metaphysically inevitable. It is that the Nazi regime built an ideological, economic, and police-state machine that made war look increasingly necessary to its own leadership. This is a historical analysis of Nazi dictatorship, antisemitic propaganda, and war planning. It condemns Nazism and uses extremist material only for educational and documentary context.

Chapters:
0:00 Q4 1937 Intro
0:53 The world at the end of 1937
1:36 Germany’s quarter of acceleration
3:30 Himmler Tightens Police Power
6:26 Der Ewige Jude and dehumanization
8:30 Hossbach: autarky fails
11:16 Halifax and diplomatic confidence
13:03 Mood inside Germany
15:09 Mein Kampf has become policy
17:16 Conclusion: the politics of beasts

Explaining our failure to expand beyond Earth to an alien

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Space, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen pens an ultra-short story in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “we” need to take a lot more money from Elon Musk to benefit “everyone”:

This-individual has an outstanding query for you-individual.

Yes, Dee-six-twenty-four-prime? Ask your question.

When we-collective initialized language-idea-exchange with you-collective, you-collective had no settlements on the surface of other planets in your-collective own star system.

Yet you-collective possessed advanced chemical propulsion technology sufficient to leave your-collective native gravity well. For over a hundred cycles around your-collective star, you-collective possessed this.

Why did you not use it?

Well, all that technology was worth a lot of money.

Value-consideration-tokens, yes. Continue.

So we decided to take it away from the really talented geniuses who built, break it up for parts, sell the parts, and throw a big free stuff party.

A … free stuff party?

Yeah, for like, average dudes. The kind of guys who don’t know calculus or anything. The ones you’d want to have a beer with. We thought we’d buy them some stuff.

Instead of leaving your home planet?

Yeah.

This-individual understands, now. Conclusions have been submitted to collective-thought-matrix. Please line you-collective up in an orderly fashion for processing, classification, and reassignment and/or biomass reclamation.

June 16, 2026

Piketty’s bid for another fifteen minutes

Filed under: Economics, France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m not an economist, so my personal opinion on Thomas Piketty’s work is based purely on the reports of others … you could say I’m not a fan. In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille discusses Piketty’s latest push to impoverish the rich nations for the noble cause of “global justice”:

Piketty’s 2021 paean to socialism and central panning.

Celebrity economist Thomas Piketty won fame with a claim that, in market economies, capital accumulates in the hands of the already wealthy, leading to increased inequality. The message found a receptive audience among people eager to believe economic success isn’t earned. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney cited Piketty in his own 2021 book-length argument that economic activity should be managed by people like Carney.

And now Piketty is back seeking new fans with a scheme for top-down central planning of the world’s economy. He is the co-director of the new Global Justice Report from the World Inequality Lab.

Introducing the project, Piketty posted on X, “The world today is characterized by large-scale inequalities. And a climate crisis is looming over us. We urgently need a new vision for global progress in the 21st Century. One that grounds human development and equality in planetary habitability.”

Piketty shoehorns an impressive number of buzz phrases into a few lines. He includes concerns about equality and inequality, climate change and progress that should send thrills through college campuses. But Piketty has a talent for tapping into the moment. In this case, at a time when Freedom House’s annual report finds that “Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025,” the economist and his colleagues propose authoritarian policies for shaping the entire planet to their liking.

In his post, Piketty asks, “What would it take to achieve high prosperity and equality while remaining within planetary boundaries?” He answers that “energy transition” (meaning moving away from power sources that produce carbon) is necessary, as well as “labour hour reductions, growth caps in rich countries, less material consumption, and changes in food habits.”

The report itself asserts, “The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.”

To fight climate change and battle inequality, Piketty and company want “full income convergence across countries by 2100.” This requires, in part, limiting growth to “around 0-0.5% in today’s richest regions (North America/Oceania, Europe).” They argue that near-zero growth in rich countries “does not mean that their living standards stagnate” because people will benefit from flattened incomes.

On his Substack, Tim Worstall says that the latest Piketty emission disproves the “we need a global wealth tax” case of fellow French economist Gabriel Zucman:

So Tommy Piketty has released his big report self-pleasuring over how a few Frogs are going to run the global economy forever. The Guardian, of course, thinks there’s merit in it:

    One of the report’s key aims is to bring every country to today’s rich-country level of €5,000 per person per month in purchasing-power terms. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is €290. The report proposes a new global fiscal and monetary architecture: taxes on the very rich would build the public realm, while a Keynesian “clearing union” and new international currency would ease the external constraints that limit poorer countries’ state spending.

Super, eh?

But the plan doesn’t just try to get the poor up to our standard of living — an excellent goal in and of itself, obviously. It also insists that we don’t increase our standard of living. For a century. Which is, you know, going to be a little more difficult.

So, how is this to be achieved? Well, this is Piketty — Frogs, eh? — so it’s going to be truly swingeing taxation of anyone who puts their head up above the parapet. The global 1% in fact.

And, well, this isn’t wholly true but it’s a useful rule of thumb, the top 1% globally is about the top 10% of the UK. -Ish, you know? Somewhere just above £50k a year for an individual in the UK. £150k for a two adult w/children household perhaps. That’s the level at which the 90% income tax swinges into action.

Oh, and, lovely wealth taxes on top too.

The effect of this is to kill economic growth. That’s what it’s designed to do too. You’ve enough, you rich bourgeois bastard, you, so that’s all you’re going to get and we’re going to use punitive taxation to make sure that’s true.

Well, OK, it’s a plan, right?

June 15, 2026

Elysium: Greed and the Crab Trap

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 23 Jan 2026

Elysium is one of those films I like more for the world it presents than the story it tells. It’s a tale of two worlds, a wealthy break-away civilization in orbit and a slowly dying civilization on Earth. On the surface it’s simplistic, preachy even, but underneath it posits some important questions both by what it tries to do and what it doesn’t even attempt to address.

00:00 Intro
01:18 Healing Magic and Healthcare Access
03:22 Overpopulation and Automation
04:18 Technology in Layers
07:50 Easy Answers to Hard Problems

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Ninti’s Gate – the prologue to Stellar Drift, coming later this year.
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June 14, 2026

The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.

Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.

To which John Carter responds:

The academic death spiral is something to behold.

Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.

At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.

We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.

Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.

Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).

[…]

“How can this be reversed?”

It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.

The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.

Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.

Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.

Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

June 13, 2026

The intellectual dangers of “nostalgia economics”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mani Basharzad explains that although resurgent socialist beliefs are a bad sign, there’s actually a worse danger to modern economies that isn’t a coherent ideology but all the more potent because of it:

Custom image by FEE

If someone asked me what the most dangerous economic ideology is, many would expect an Austrian to give a typical answer: Marxism, socialism, or Modern Monetary Theory. Yet I believe there is another way of thinking that is even more pervasive. It is not a coherent body of ideas like those ideologies. Rather, it is a sentiment so widespread and socially accepted that it threatens not merely economic freedom, but our very understanding of progress itself. I call it “nostalgia economics”.

Recently, the singer Sting suggested that the rise of toxic masculinity is partly the result of the “loss of manual jobs”, claiming that because many men no longer use their hands and physical strength in their daily work, unhealthy masculine traits are on the rise. Like many commentators on the political left, he also blamed Margaret Thatcher for Britain’s economic transformation. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards”, Sting said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”

This is nostalgia economics in action. A global celebrity whose music can be streamed instantly on another continent, who earns income through digital platforms, and whose career depends on modern communications and services, criticizes the very service economy that makes his success possible.

A person in thrall to nostalgia economics will take the blessings of progress for granted while romanticizing a past that never truly existed. Imagine living in the world of Charles Dickens: you would not have had access to a typewriter for much of your life, if at all, since it was only commercialized in the late 19th century. More importantly, you would not have had access to electricity. The conveniences we now consider basic would have been unimaginable luxuries.

The economic historian Norman Stone illustrated the extraordinary pace of modern progress through the experience of the novelist Henry James:

    In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a cinematograph. Within very few years, he could have had a Freudian analysis, travelled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even of space-travel.

Had Sting been alive in 1890, a world tour would have looked very different. A journey from London to New York would have taken more than a week rather than a few hours. International audiences, instant communication, and global entertainment markets would have been beyond imagination.

The glorification of manual labor is one of the most overrated ideas in modern political discourse. This tendency is not confined to the left. Ambitions to revive manufacturing employment through government policy often draw on the same nostalgic impulse. But what exactly are we trying to return to?

Perhaps literature offers a more honest answer than politics. Oscar Wilde observed that “all unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour” involved unpleasant conditions. He went even further, commenting that “there is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading”.

The reality of industrial labor was far harsher than many modern observers imagine. In Britain, workplace fatalities have fallen dramatically over the last century: fatal injuries to employees dropped from around 4,400 a year early in the 20th century to around 200 a year by the end of the century. Coal mining, one of the occupations most frequently romanticized today and the first industry Sting evoked, exposed workers to constant danger and disease. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (“black lung”) claimed well over a thousand lives annually. What would a laborer enduring dangerous conditions, long hours, and chronic health risks have given for an air-conditioned office job?

One thing Sting did identify is that men generally do need more physical activity in their lives both for general physical health but also for mental health.

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